Chapter 9. Shapeshifter - Osho

Life of Osho

Chapter 9. Shapeshifter

But what was it like, talking to Osho at darshan? What was he really like, face to face?

I have been staring into space, trying to find the right way of putting it.

“This gentle vegetarian” wrote the American novelist Tom Robbins, in a phrase the ashram loves to quote. There, so far as I am concerned, speaks someone who never sat in front of Osho. Gentle vegetarian, my eye. He was scary, Osho; he was really scary… What was it he said? “You open an abyss before them, and you tempt them to jump.” Well, that’s what it felt like – just like that. If I had to put it in very few words I’d say what Osho did was show me the possibility of total freedom… and what I did was to panic.

What’s most in the way of approaching Osho is the model of the saint. Centuries of Christian conditioning have drilled it into everyone this is the way a ‘spiritual’ person behaves – when they are not going off into their precious alternative reality, they creep around like Goody Two Shoes. For Osho, just as much as for Nietzsche, this is a complete perversion of the religious impulse. The Christian saint is a product of class society: the Christian saint is an advert for slavery. Destruction of this whole, ultimately political, account of spiritual life is the sine qua non of any new sense of the sacred appearing today.

At the beginning of his teaching work, Osho’s great American contemporary, Da Free John tried to convey the nature of enlightenment from the inside: “The man of understanding is not entranced. He is not elsewhere. He is not having an experience. He is not passionless and inoffensive. He is awake. He is present. He knows no obstruction in the form of mind, identity, differentiation and desire. He is passionate. His quality is an offense to those who are entranced, elsewhere, contained in the mechanics of experience, asleep…”

That’s much more like it. That’s what it was like up there in the hot seat. Intense to the point of being almost painful.

Free John continues:

“… He is not spiritual. He is not religious. He is not – philosophical. He is not moral. He is not fastidious, lean and lawful. He always appears to be the opposite of what you are.

He always seems to sympathise with what you deny… He is a seducer, a madman, a hoax, a libertine, a fool, a moralist, a sayer of truths, a bearer of all experience, a righteous knave, a prince, a child, an old one, an ascetic, a god.”

That’s what Osho was like, he didn’t have a proper shape. “Bhagwan’s a bearded lady” announced one of the young kids careering round the ashram. In fact if Osho was like anything, he was like a young child;- but a child who had somehow escaped the adults, and grown up to equip himself with a massive intellect… I remember one darshan when he was going on to me at length about the group, how we should do something or other; I forget what, but it was all run-of-the-mill, practical stuff. He finished, and I started to get to my feet. At the exact moment I was physically most offbalance, he hissed at me, apropos of nothing, ”Life is absolutely meaningless!” It was a perfect shot. I straightened

up and looked at him. There he was, beaming up at me, with this horrible expression of happiness on his face, as though he had informed me I had just won the Lottery. But that was what he kept on saying, wasn’t it? “This is the deepest realisation of all the knowers: that your being is a non-being. To say it is a being is wrong because it is not something, it is not like something. It is like nothing: a vast emptiness, with no boundaries to it. It is an anatma, a no-self; it is not a self inside you.

“All feelings of self are false. All identifications that ‘I am this or that’ are false.

“When you come to the ultimate, when you come to your deepest core, you suddenly know that you are neither this nor that – you are no one. You are not an ego, you are just a vast emptiness. And sometimes if you sit, close your eyes and just feel who you are – where are you? Go deeper and you may become afraid, because the deeper you go, the deeper you feel that you are nobody, a nothingness. That’s why people become so scared of meditation. It is a death. It is a death of the ego.”

Osho was like an abyss… That was the first thing about darshan, then, the sense of vertigo… and, in its way, you could understand it. But there was another dimension to darshan which I didn’t understand then, and which I still don’t understand today.

Osho had some kind of energy field round him… I don’t know anything about these things, but this was something you could definitely feel for yourself, but you had to get close to him physically to do so. In Tantra this is called the guru’s shakti, his energy; and its direct transmission from guru to disciple, shaktipat. That sounds very grand, but the things which started to happen to me were downright weird more than anything else. One time I started to shake. One hand was shaking so violently I had to hold it on the ground with the other one, and then that one started to shake too. (Osho was sufficiently sporting to pretend not to notice this bizarre performance, continuing without a hiccup in his Thus-Spake-Zarathustra mode.) The space around him seemed to be flickering slightly, or vibrating. Another time I remember looking at his chair, and the angle it made with the floor was mutually impossible – do you know what I mean, the lines failed to converge in the distance, the same way they can do on LSD? Something definitely happened to my eyesight.

When he was talking to you Osho always fixed you with his eyes – and it was true, just like they say about hypnotists, they did grow bigger and bigger. So did his whole head. Bearded, bald and implacably merry it seemed to fill the whole porch. All of it was very like LSD.

At the time I thought I was just getting hysterical. I thought all this weirdness was some kind of defence I was throwing up – basically as a way to stop myself getting sucked into his reality. Resistance, that’s what I thought it was… Now I am no longer so sure. In conversation several other old sannyasins have said the same thing about talking to Osho at darshan being like coming on to acid. Same brightness, same elation, same thinning out of matter. Same edge of fear… Is this something more than just a metaphor?

Are there parallels between kundalini activation and LSD – or is that completely crazy?